Caracas beckoning

It’s a strange mix of bloodl ust and foreign policy machinations. In ‘Mercenaries 2: World in Flames’, a popular computer game produced by an American company that has also made promotional ads for the US army, small kids are supposed to play shooters in a war-torn Venezuela. In the animated game, as a coup leader tries to grab the country’s oil supply, war erupts between a petroleum firm’s hired mercenaries and the Venezuelan army. Then the plot thickens as China invades Venezuela to secure its oil to meet its rising hunger for fossil fuels and the CIA joins the game. And then it’s a free-for-all, with blood flowing like water, oil refineries going up in flames, and the game ending with a change of regime in Venezuela.

Last month, life seemed to be imitating a game in Venezuela, as amidst the heat and dust of presidential election campaign, a blast at the country’s biggest oil refinery killed 48 people – half of them National Guards – and destroyed facilities producing 645,000 barrels of oil every day. A few days later, another big refinery blew up and president Hugo Chavez’s right-wing rival Henrique Capriles accused the incumbent of “gross negligence” and “under-investment” in safety standards. And Chavez’s supporters, who see ‘Mercenaries 2′ as an attempt to drum up public support in US for an attack on Venezuela, called it a conspiracy to dent the country’s finances to ruin the president’s social welfare programmes and his chances of winning a record third term.

On Monday morning, when the results came out, Chavez won the election with a 11% margin – less than 26% in 2006 – as all the hype created around Capriles collapsed. The western media, which were backing Capriles – son of a shopping mall developer – as an agent of change, and projecting Chavez as a nutcase, indulging in histrionics to build a personality cult, missed one crucial fact. Since coming to power in 1999, Chavez has put the country’s oil dollars into social projects called Missions that deliver free medical care, housing, education and cut-rate groceries to the nation’s poor. On Sunday, the poor rallied behind Chavez again.

But interestingly the Venezuelan poll result made top headlines – from Brasilia to Washington to Beijing. Why was the world so interested in the election of a small South American nation? The reason being that it was not a contest between Chavez and Capriles, but a three-layered fight with global ramifications. At the domestic level, it was a fight between the residents of poor barrios and middle-class condominiums; at the regional level, a clash between the left and right of all South American nations many of which have adopted Chavez’s social policies; and globally, it was a shadow-boxing match between the world powers eyeing Venezuelan oil. Even New Delhi was anxiously watching the election.

Recently, Venezuela has overtaken Saudi Arabia as the number one in the world for proven oil reserves. According to a BP report, Venezuela has reserves of 296.5 billion barrels, about 10% more than Saudi Arabia and 18% of the global total. The reason Capriles became such a darling of the western media was that he promised to change Venezuela’s way of doing its oil business. It meant curbing Russian and Chinese companies and ending subsidised oil shipments to Cuba, Belarus, Nicaragua and Syria.

Chavez, who plays an important role in determining the global oil prices, has another plan. The president has promised to ramp up production, cut down dependence on the US market and double its crude exports to Asia. Venezuela plans to make a pipeline through Colombia to the Pacific, reducing costs and transport time to China and other Asian countries. Besides completely changing the energy security ties between Asia and the Americas, this could be good news for India as well. With the Middle-East region, from where India gets majority of its oil, hobbling from one war to another, India could look at Venezuela – and South America – as a source of reliable and cheap oil. Till now, there has been a problem in importing crude from Venezuela as most Indian PSU refineries are capable of dealing with only sweet crude and the South American country mainly has sour crude. But now private Indian refineries can process both varieties of crude.

Reliance has signed a project agreement with Venezuela to produce heavy oil in the South American nation. It also signed a pact to buy more Venezuelan oil for its refineries in India. Though ONGC Videsh-led Indian consortium plans to raise its investment in Venezuela to $ 3 billion, it will be wrong to treat Venezuela just as a source of cheap oil. Chavez’s free healthcare offers not only a good opportunity to Indian pharma companies for supplying critical drugs at affordable prices, it’s also a chance for India to get involved in Venezuela’s health programme, that can be easily replicated at home.

In an intelligent way, Chavez is turning the country’s petro wealth into social capital. Notwithstanding serious social problems Venezuela is trying to evolve into a better society. Despite fears expressed in the western media, the Sunday election was absolutely peaceful. It seems the makers of ‘Mercenaries 2′ will have to wait for a long time for their dark fantasies to come true.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Shobhan Saxena is a Sao Paulo-based journalist. An editor with Sunday Times of India before moving to Brazil, he now reports on politics, trade, culture, music and, of course, football. Though Shobhan's interests range from international issues, human rights and politics to art & culture, what really fascinates him is the extraordinary lives of ordinary people - the men and women on the street, their lives and their views on everything under the sun. Here, he tries to capture small slices of those colourful lives in Brazil and other South American countries.
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Shobhan Saxena is a Sao Paulo-based journalist. An editor with Sunday Times of India before moving to Brazil, he now reports on politics, trade, culture, mu. . .